Mrs. Jessup

Sallie Reynolds

Word Count 1734

In 1958, between my sophomore and junior years of college, I got my first real job in a big hospital in North Carolina, part of an investigation into cervical cancer in “indigent” farm women. My task was to collect family and medical histories from the participants, patients in the hospital’s Cancer Ward. My boss had a grant to pay them.

Every morning, I went in with cookies and flowers and, after I got to know them, the twists of chewing tobacco they asked for. The young ones would show me worn snapshots of their children, explaining earnestly how they had to get home to this one because if you didn’t watch her every second, she ran off in woods. Or this little angel? He’d beat up his baby brother.

The older ones talked about their mothers. Their mothers, they said, would have known, as nobody else did, what they were going through. Had they been ill, too? I asked. And wrote down the names so we could check medical records.

Like farm women everywhere, they cooked and kept house and tended to the animals. The older ones, after their children were grown, also worked the harvests every fall. Oh, the power in those little bodies – all bone and sinew, faces burned and worn a deep tan, with dark lines where dust, from decades of wind scouring harrowed fields, had etched them.

They liked to touch my skin. Let me see your hands, dearie! And they’d take my hands in their rough, bent fingers, clucking over my smooth skin. You are so young, they said. One or two would touch my face, a butterfly kiss, and ask me if I used a “softener.”

I fell in love with Mrs. Jessup, sitting up like a 5-year-old in her iron bed with its raised bars, calling out, in a startlingly loud voice, “I don’t have but a minute to spare you, dearie, my daughter’s coming for me this very morning.” Then she’d talk as long as I stayed. The daughter never came.

Mrs. Jessup described herself as a “dirt” farmer. “People call us that,” she said, “like we’re beneath them.” But on their scraps of land, these families were generations wise in survival. Tobacco was their money crop, a pig and some chickens their meat. Their staples – corn, potatoes, onions, blood-beets, and “pickles”– were things that keep. Mrs. Jessup was famous for her preserves, especially her tomato-pepper jelly, a recipe she had from her grandmother. Her grandchildren sold it by the side of the road as fire-jam. “Everybody with a hot-tooth,” she said, “wants my fire-jam!”

On a friend’s big dairy farm, the dirt-farmers were hired every year to helped with the hay after their own crops were in. At 13, I had my first crush – a young hired-hand named Bernard, who worked harder than anybody, and had the beautiful muscles to prove it. My friend said he was “nothing but white trash.” But Bernard knew everything there was to know about animals and plants, and answered my questions without making me feel like an idiot. My friend’s brothers, boys of “good breeding,” had none of his courtesy or knowledge.

What drew me to Mrs. Jessup was this same deep knowing, and her sparrow-bright eyes, her bird-leg bones. Her skin sat lightly on her, like tissue paper. She had no upper teeth. Her hair was wispy, pink skull showing through. She’d say, “Oh your hair, dearie, your wonderful hair, mine was red too, would you believe, and thick as cream.”  I didn’t confess that I dyed mine.

She talked about her daughter, the one who was always on her way at that very moment to take her home, and her dead husband, a good man, tender with the children, even as babies. “Lot of men don’t love a baby,” she said, “a mouth to feed that don’t give back.” But oh, the farm, a little farm – “We aint your fancy landowners, but we feed ev-er-y-body!” She sang the word. “Yes ma’am, you get yourself a little piece of sweet land, and it’ll keep you.” Her eyes, the color of topaz, gleamed deep in their sockets. Meeting them was like looking inside her.

She talked about her cancer. “Oh, I was sick, just like my mama before me. But I had the children and the man, the pigs and the chickens – I wouldn’t come in. But my man brought me here in spite of everything, and they cut the cancer out – 20 years! Cut it all out. And then didn’t I go and outlive him!”

One day she said, “I’m partial to you, dearie, for you look just like my Cora, named for me, Cora, Cora Jessup, that’s me and her! We was alike in every way but one. I never wanted to leave the land or my man, and by the time she was 14 – much younger than you, dearie, young as you are – and you’re going to have you a boy to raise one of these days. I know. You make sure he goes to school, now. I went as long as they’d have me. But my real joy was ever with them all. Little Cora – 14 years old, all the time wanting to go here, go there. Home wasn’t never enough. You, dearie, you look just like her, red-haired, freckles on your pretty nose. Let me give you a hug for my Cora.”

I hugged her for a long time. I couldn’t bring myself to ask what happened to her Cora.  

Every day for a month, Mrs. Jessup held my hand and talked. She didn’t mention Cora again. “Let me read your lines,” she said. “I’m a future-teller.” She spread my hand. “You’re facing trouble, but a strong heart will see you through. You’ll have that boy I told you about, you don’t believe in him yet, but he’ll be a comfort to you. So make the best of him!”

I laughed at this fairy-land child and said, “Oh I will, I will.”

One day, she seemed wan and vague. She must have often been tired, but when I appeared, she’d gather her strength. Now her voice was low. “My Cora left the farm. Fifteen years ago. Where is she now, won’t you tell me? Please. Just tell me, is she in the land of the living?”

What on earth could I say?

“D’you bring me my dip?”

 I’d been told not to give snuff or chewing tobacco any more.

 “Dip frees the hands for the cooking and the babies. I need my dip.”

  She leaned out of my hug like a small child who yearns to be put down. She squeezed her eyes shut.

 The next day, she was gone. The Ward Supervisor stood in the aisle. She didn’t approve of me or my boss or his research – wasting everybody’s time, she said. An orderly was mopping the floor with bleach.

 “Mrs. Donovan,” I said, “where is Mrs. Jessup?”

 “That goddamn bitch!”

 I couldn’t believe my ears.

 “Jail’s too good for that one – you know what she is? Nothing but a –” and she spat out that word decent people even then wouldn’t say, because it’s a noose.

 I said, “Mrs. Donovan, I’ve been sent to talk to Mrs. Jessup.”

 “Ah, she got to you, the sly filth. And you were just sucking it up! Well I found her out, I knew she was a liar.”

I ran to the lab, and told my boss, and big kind-hearted bear-man that he was, I thought he was going to cry. “Let me find out what happened,” he said.

“Yes,” he said later, “Mrs. Jessup is a Negro. Skin’s no darker than mine or yours and she’s been coming to the White Ward the entire twenty years of her cancer. We all know her, one of the interns actually went out to her farm. And now she’s had a recurrence.”

He said, “That Donovan witch went to the county records, found Mrs. Jessup listed as N, not W, and sent her right off to the Negro Ward. I am doing my damnedest to have Mrs. Donovan fired. But I won’t get anywhere. And there’s nothing on earth I can do for Mrs. Jessup.”

 The Negro Ward was small and shabby, the air rank with chemicals and a strange, sweetish-sour smell. Actually, it wasn’t just shabby, it was dirty – gritty floor, overflowing trash cans. The beds were close together, no curtains. And every one occupied. I was crying by the time I found her.

“Mrs. Jessup?”

Her eyes opened.

“I’ve been looking for you.” I took her hand. “I nearly went crazy, when I couldn’t find you.”

She said nothing for a long time. Then patted my hand. “And you didn’t never suspect.”

I wanted to howl.

Then I noticed a figure, shadowy, in the corner behind the bed. A middle-aged woman, hair red as mine, face like a cracked China cup.

“I told you she’d come back, my Cora,” Mrs. Jessup said. “She’s a good girl. Brought me my dip.”

I was still holding her hand, breathing in her hair, her skin, the nicotine. “I don’t want to interrupt you,” I said. “Tomorrow I’ll bring some sweet lotion. And a rose. You told me you missed your roses.”

The shadow-woman waved her hand at the table, at a large lotion bottle.

“Well, the rose, then,” I stammered. “Tomorrow.”

The next day, the bed was empty. I stood over the stained mattress, holding the rose.

In the lab, my boss said, “Yes, Mrs. Jessup died.”

He lifted the rose out of my fingers and put it in a beaker of water. “Here’s what I’ve learned: her husband was white, so the marriage wasn’t legal. If the children aren’t named specifically in the will, they may lose the farm.”

“And I called attention to her,” I said.

“The research did that,” he said. “I’d have had to drop her. Goddam rules make it all a travesty.”

“Take the rest of the day off,” he said. “While I decide what to do.”

So I sat in the hospital garden on a marble bench, looking up at that fortress – gray solid stone, windows set in deep recesses, like skull eyes.

I knew I couldn’t stay, even if the research went on.

The tower bells counted the hours: Two. Three. 

The stone shadows turned purple. 

The light began to fade.  

Sallie is 86, lives back of beyond in Northern California with her painter-writer-mechanic husband, a grand dog, and two hawks (she’s a licensed falconer.) She had to live this long in order to become a decent human being. Her stories are here and there, her two novels are on Amazon.